An Interview with Michael Wellman by Molly Brown

Original recording of interview

Editor’s note:  Michael Wellman recently wrote a PhD. dissertation titled “Rewilding Activism: Weaving Resistance, Reskilling and Re-membering” for the California Institute of Integral Studies.  After seeing how thoroughly the Work That Reconnects is woven throughout his dissertation, I wanted to interview Michael to bring his insights and perspectives to Deep Times readers.  Part One of the interview appeared in the March 2023 issue of Deep Times.

Part Two focuses on Going Forth in the Great Turning. (We edited the transcript for readability, but not the audio recording of the interview.) 

Molly:  Michael, you said that you wanted to address honoring our pain and the need to be with those feelings. But you also wanted to look at where do we go from here, using the Great Turning as your framework. In your dissertation, you have three things under that section: Resistance, Reskilling, and Re-Membering. Do you want to say a little bit about each one of those?

Michael: I’ll mention, since we’re on the Work That Reconnects, that there were several Honoring Our Pain practices at that [WTR] intensive I did [with Joanna] in California that really helped me move to the next phase [of the spiral]. I remember the “Open Sentences” practice, and looking in my partner’s eyes, and watching my partner who had tears and then making space for my own tears. Another practice was the “Truth Mandala,” and being able to grab that stick and trying to break it and having permission to express my rage in front of a group of people. I feel like allowing those emotions to move creates space for new feelings and fresh energy to circulate in. 

  I twice have done one practice with Joanna that gave the most direction to my work. It was “Harvesting the Gifts of the Ancestors,” where we’re walking back through time, and we get to more or less the beginning of time — Deep Time, Big History. Then we start walking forward, the other way. The first time I did it, I had this connection with my lineage of family as farmers and being rooted in the land through that connection. The second time I did this exercise a few months later, that first experience came back to me, and I remembered the connection I had felt to my earliest human ancestors. I think Joanna took us all the way back to the plains of Africa, coming down out of the trees, and starting to expand outward on the savannas. During the group share, several other people mentioned that somewhere in the transition around the Neolithic or the beginning of agriculture, not wanting to keep moving forward, wanting to hold on to those oldest ancestors, and not wanting to say their goodbyes.  There was something that I felt there that really rooted my dissertation in a land-based connection. 

 

I thought, “Well, what is it like to look at the Great Turning model through three land-based dimensions?”  For the first dimension, Resistance, Joanna Macy’s “Holding Actions,” I asked, “What is it like for us to do land defense, water protection, these anti-pipeline and anti-extractivism campaigns?” What I think is now really associated with Standing Rock, Mni Wiconi, Water Is Life, and the LandBack movement. Recognizing that our social movements — like we’ve seen with the George Floyd Uprising or even some of the resistance to Trumpism, MAGA, and the white nationalist currents — they’re all one and the same movement, and yet, I focused on the land and water components.  

Then, Reskilling was based on Joanna’s “building alternative systems,” looking at the resurgence of  land-based lifeways, both in the more traditional sense of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and indigenous land management practices, as well as  some of the more current threads of permaculture, ancestral skills gatherings, and agro-ecology.

Molly: Yeah, huge, huge area! Yes, there’s so much going on in that respect.

Michael: Yeah, I’m trying to give land-based lifeways more space and normalize it a bit more. So often I feel like people see movements that are not rooted in more technology — or that maybe look like we have to give something up — as unattractive. If resisting extractivism is important — and we need to save old growth forests, we need clean water, we need to slow down the fossil fuels and stop the pipelines — then what is a non-extractive or less-extractive way of living?

Molly: Right, and that takes us to reskilling. Yes. I live in acorn country and I’ve learned how to make acorn meal; it’s very labor intensive! Boy, it tastes good, too!  I put it in tortillas or bread. Even just knowing that these nuts are falling from the trees and it’s free food. But it takes some skills to know how to use it.

Michael: Yeah, there’s actually an essay in my dissertation on acorn processing. My wife and I were guest lecturers in a land ethics undergraduate class at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville last semester, and we took acorn flour that we had processed. My wife mixed it with maple syrup that we had harvested from our maple trees during sugarbush and made small cakes for the class. There was only one person in this class of maybe thirty-two people that even knew that acorns were edible. One piece of information that has been really empowering for me was learning that humans as a species, until very recently, ate more acorns than all other food sources combined. Acorn eaters were very much demonized as empires and agricultural civilizations began to expand, because they were able to live outside of taxation, they were able to live outside of the control of the empires. I believe that even if people aren’t actively processing acorns all the time–because like you said, it’s very laborious, it’s one of those skills where you have to do it in community. But just knowing the skill and knowing that if you ever had to, you could use that skill, I feel that’s a source of liberation. 

  I’ll just mention here, the last dimension, what I call Re-Membering, what Joanna has called “shifting consciousness.” I look at this healing through land-based rituals and ceremonies, traditional rites of passage, expanded states of consciousness (such as solos on the land, plant medicine ceremonies, and sweat lodges), through a lot of what we would call shamanic modalities, which land-based cultures have been using for time immemorial for healing, for connection to Source, for all sorts of aspects of their culture. So I look through this lens, recognizing that healing is a foundational part of the Great Turning.

Molly:  I like the way you’re spelling re-membering, like reassembling, in a sense. Re-membering is much more biological; reassembling sounds kind of mechanical.

Michael: And that comes from healing, the same root as wholeness. In traditional cultures, the role of the shaman was to travel into other worlds and bring back those lost parts of ourselves. What we know in modern trauma theory is that when someone has a traumatic experience–an experience that’s outside of the body’s (or nervous system’s) capacity to integrate–that part of the psyche is fragmented, broken, or severed…

 Molly: or dissociated.

Michael:  Exactly. And so the re-membering is very literally the re-membering of all those lost and forgotten and disassociated parts, of moving back towards wholeness.

Molly: Is there anything else you want to share? I want to just comment that the amount of research that went into the dissertation is truly admirable and amazing. It covers such a large area, and so many different movements and movements within movements. I am really, really impressed. No wonder it took you eight years!

Michael: For me, it was important that “I am a body on the body of the Earth”—which came to me  from Janine Canty, who is a teacher at the California Institute of Integral Studies  now, and who was on my [dissertation] committee. I expanded this concept to be “I am a body within a movement body on the body of the earth.” And so I really chose to immerse myself in these movements, not just as some sort of participatory observation but as an observant participant. I put my body on the line in the movements. I went to a lot of skills gatherings and convergences, did organizing, and participated in my own healing through ceremonies. And so my stories are really written in a way of embedding myself within the larger social and cultural story, what academia might call “auto-ethnography.” It was important for me to really share my own learnings as my own body within the movement body.

Molly: I was reading this morning where you even describe the details of how you got up the tree, into the sky pod, and how you climbed the rope to get up there. So it really is very much your experience, embodied experience with these different movements, not just something you’ve read about, or talked to somebody about; you’ve actually done it.

Michael: Yeah, I appreciate that feedback, because the embodied experience is the only way forward, especially in this time of planetary crisis. We can have all the theories in the world, but if we’re not putting them into practice and getting our hands dirty in the soil, we can’t improve our theories and keep working towards where we want to go. It’s that praxis at the edge of theory where our practices keep influencing our theories. And we need both. But especially as an academic, it is really important for me to practice what I’m preaching and preach what I’m practicing.

Molly: That sounds like a great final remark, but maybe there’s more that you would like to say before we end?

Michael: I feel it [the dissertation] was written for activists. And so I want to keep true to that. And again, that idea from Joanna Macy, where she looks at each of these three dimensions as a form of activism. So our healers can be activists and our gardeners can be activists; we can all all be activists if we recognize that all three dimensions are inherently political. And so claiming the politics of the Great Turning is important.

Molly: and no one person could do it all. It takes all of us with our particular skills and resources and life situations to do what we’re called to do. I’m very big on the idea of calling, because I think the calling is  from outside. It’s not just from inside; it’s that inside/outside connection.

Michael: Yes, the purpose and passion to show up. 

Molly: The calling changes, because circumstances change. “Oh, we need somebody over here to do this thing. Oh, this person is the perfect person for that. Come on, do this!”

Michael: And that’s actually the last thing I’ll add, because I do think it’s so important. Joanna Macy teaches that these three dimensions are overlapping, right? There’s the three intersections of the three dimensions, and then at the very center there’s the nexus where the three dimensions meet. The three main chapters in my dissertation look at the three intersections of the three dimensions. So many people are doing work within each of the three dimensions, and it felt really important to me to ask how do we start bringing these different conversations into conversation with each other so we can leverage each other’s skill sets to strengthen and build an alliance. That to me is really the exciting part of the work at the edge of our callings. Even if they seem different at the surface, how do we find those areas of symbiosis and mutuality so that we can amplify our work together?

Molly: And rather than, “You should be doing this instead of that,” we can be supportive and joyful about other people’s different contributions, and seeing that all as contributions rather than, “Oh, you should join my team.” My team is playing basketball and yours is playing baseball, and we have to appreciate the different things that need to be done, and that various people are doing them. 

Michael: There is no shortage of things to be done.

Molly: It’s not just up to me. And being “up to me” is part of that individualism or separation that has to melt away,

Michael: And the centralization and hierarchy that needs to melt away. Trusting the decentralization, the network model, being in mutual aid, and recognizing that we need to trust each other that we’re showing up and doing what we need to do. And how can we continue to lean on each other? Beautiful.

Molly: Yep.  And on the more-than-human world as well. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Michael.

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Michael Lynn Wellman is a recent doctoral graduate from the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Michael’s dissertation, “Rewilding Activism: Weaving Resistance, Reskilling, and Re-Membering,” is inspired by his time working with Joanna Macy and the Work That Reconnects. Michael is a father, husband, activist, and guide who lives on the shores of Gichigami (Lake Superior) on occupied Anishinaabek lands.